Nineteenth-Century American Women's Literature

Sarah Robbins
English Department
HU 224

Description: This course will explore the literature written and read by American women of the nineteenth century. We will study some of the century's best sellers, with an eye on what made them so popular then, and with an effort to consider how the process of academic literary canon formation has excluded many of these same texts from American literature courses and anthologies. Similarly, we will explore some of the "women's" genres--such as the diary, the magazine piece, and the local color short story--and we will ask why some of the characteristics of these genres may have worked to keep their authors from lists of "major" American authors. In contextualizing the composition of our readings within specific historical moments, we will study ways in which American women's literature has shaped and been shaped by American culture--including issue-oriented movements spearheaded by women (like the campaign for Native American rights and the fight against slavery), as well as socioeconomic developments (like the growth of the literary marketplace, where the "profession" of "lady writer" was one of the first to open up to women). Because our emphasis will be on the reading as well as the writing of these texts, we will question chronological categories like our own course's use of the phrase "nineteenth century." Specifically, we will all read at least one text written in the late eighteenth century but read voraciously throughout the nineteenth, one written during the early twentieth century but based on a woman's thoughtful reexamination of her own nineteenth century learning experiences, and one written in the 1980's but drawing on the legacy of nineteenth-century women's texts about slavery.

General Requirements: The class will be a collaborative enterprise, with students actively contributing to our classroom community's understandings of the texts and topics we will explore. To that end, students will

• read whole texts and excerpts from the list below
  
• participate actively in informal class discussions
  
• prepare interpretive presentations for the class
  
• write frequent, informal response exercises in and out of class
  
• plan and carry out one major writing project
  
• write one report based on reading secondary source material
  
• take a short "objective" exam
  
• complete and share an individualized/group reading project related to course content.

Choice list for individual or small-group reading and a presentation to the class:

• Catharine Maria Sedgwick--Hope Leslie
  
• Susanna Rowson--Charlotte Temple
  
• Harriet Beecher Stowe--The Pearl of Orr's Island or The Minister's Wooing
  
• Linda Brent--Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
  
• Sarah Parton (Fanny Fern)--Ruth Hall
  
• Elizabeth Phelps--The Silent Partner
  
• Sarah Orne Jewett--The Country of the Pointed Firs
  
• Joan Hedrick--recent biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe
  
• Rebecca Harding Davis--Margaret Howth
  
• Willa Cather--The Song of the Lark or O Pioneers!
  
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman--Herland or Women and Economics
  
• Louisa May Alcott--Little Women or Work
  
• Beecher and Stowe--House and Home Papers
  
• Sarah Josepha Hale, ed. --representative selections from Godey's Lady's Magazine
  
• Caroline M. Kirkland--A New Home, Who'll Follow?
  
• a nineteenth-century American woman's diary
  
• a "European" text especially popular with nineteenth-century American women: e.g., Eliot's Romola or Middlemarch
• a "women's" novel by G. Sand
• an historical novel by Scott

Week One: The Americanization of British Authors and the Education of Women as Teaching Mothers for the American Republic

• 1) Barbauld--children's literature and advice books, as edited by Hale
  
• 2) Rowson-- excerpts from Charlotte Temple, school poems and plays, excerpts from other writings about female education for the Republic

• 1) Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, memoir of a nineteenth-century Canadian settler's experiences
  
• 2) response exercise due; Margaret Atwood's twentieth-century poetry drawing on Moodie's text

• 1) Hobomok
  
• 2) more on Hobomok and the women's movements in support of Native Americans

• 1a) excerpts from Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly
  
• 1b) Choose one set of excerpts from the course pack: Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, Warner's The Wide, Wide World, Grimke's journals
  
• 2) read and write an informal response to Fanny Fern's newspaper pieces

• 1) Doctor Zay (Begin discussion)
  
• 2) Doctor Zay, preparation for Addams' and Beecher's texts

• 1) excerpts from Addams' Twenty Years at Hull-House OR from Catharine Beecher's Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions
  
• 2) Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper"; research reports due

• 1) My Antonia
  
• 2a) continue discussion of My Antonia
  
• 2b) oral sharing by the instructor of excerpts from I Came a Stranger and other texts of/from the nineteenth-century immigrant experience; oral sharing of material from Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech
  
• 3) Begin discussion of Life in the Iron Mills

• 1) oral reports based on individual and/or group reading projects; Begin Beloved
  
• 2) more oral reports based on individual and/or group reading projects; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (excerpts)

• 1) Beloved (Complete reading.); Informally assessing progress on major projects
  
• 2) Beloved (Continue discussion.); more oral reports

• 1) Beloved (Complete discussion.)
  
• 2) sharing of work from major projects; major projects due

• folder of informal response pieces and occasional in-class free-writes composed in reaction to your reading
  
• oral report from reading groups/individualized reading choice
  
• research report: a SHORT paper summarizing and critiquing one of the following:
  
  1. at least one secondary source's treatment of a nineteenth-century women's literature text
  2. a scholarly study of a course theme/issue, or
  3. another appropriate research piece connected to our course topics (e.g., a cultural studies essay on women's reading practices in the nineteenth-century, a sociolinguistic analysis of women's ways of reading "women's" novels)

• major project paper: This paper may draw on any one or a combination of literary-critical traditions to analyze a particular text we've studied together or one you'd like to write about because of its connections to our course topics and/or themes. For example, you might produce a "close reading" of a short nineteenth-century American women's text, such as a diary entry, a story or a poem. You might draw on cultural studies and/or new historical perspectives to interpret a particular text, reading it as a socially constructed document shaped by a variety of forces in addition to authorial intent. You might provide a sociolinguistic or "anthropological" study of our class's reading of a particular text, drawing, for instance, on surveys of our reading reactions. You might, on the other hand, "deconstruct" one twentieth-century text's representation of nineteenth-century femininity.

  Your paper may be focused on the same text you use for your oral report (#4 above). It may also draw on shared reading from our course, if you prefer.

• final exam

• folder grade based on response papers = 20%
  
• oral report from reading choice = 10%
  
• research report = 10%
  
• major project = 30%
  
• exam = 20%
  
• general class participation = 10%

• Since a portion of your grade is based on class participation, regular attendance is particularly important. If you must miss class, let the instructor know ahead of time. If you cannot attend a class when a paper or other assignment is due, you are responsible for getting your work turned in before the class meeting time.
  
• Late work will be penalized 5 points for each class period overdue.
  
• The last day to drop the course without academic penalty is May 4.

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